Reading Melville's Pierre; or, The Ambiguities

Preface

vii Preface Pierre; or, The Ambiguities, Herman Melville’s seventh book, was catastrophic for him. It lost him his English publisher, and reviewers of the American edition (1852) accused the book and the author of being mad. In the remainder of the nineteenth century, Pierre was dismissed as Melville’s “late miserable abortion” and characterized as repulsive, insane, and unreadable . Even after the book was rediscovered during the Melville Revival of the 1920s, it has persistently evoked critical uneasiness and often outright disdain. Nonetheless, Pierre is now generally recognized as one of Melville’s most significant works, the book nearest to Moby-Dick not only in time but also in the ambitiousness of its aims and in the power of at least some of its passages. Melville scholars and critics have yet to recognize, however, the events in Melville’s life that brought about the publication of the book they know as Pierre, the version published in 1852. Knowledge of the compositional history and the multiple, contradictory impulses that produced this version is essential to comprehending the book that had such a devastating effect on Melville’s career yet seemed to its author, in the early stages of its composition, as likely to be greater even than Moby-Dick. In “The Flawed Grandeur of Melville’s Pierre” (1978), we argued that Melville’s belated decision, in January 1852, to turn the hero of his new manuscript into an author seriously damaged the work because many parts of the extensive interpolated passages were inconsistent with his original intentions . Further study of the documentary evidence indicated that Melville completed the book in a short form about the end of 1851, before receiving a contract from the Harpers for it. Intrigued by the Melville-loving Maurice Sendak’s fascination with Pierre, Parker seized the opportunity to let him illustrate something unique, a radical text as close as possible to Melville’s original version of the novel, one which omitted all the late-added sections on Pierre as author. This Kraken edition of Pierre (HarperCollins, 1995) was, of course, designed as a nonce text, intended only to complement, certainly not to replace, the standard Northwestern-Newberry edition (1971). RECTO RUNNING HEAD viii “Having this short version of Pierre in print,” Parker argued, “will at last make it feasible for lovers of Melville to comprehend his original design for the book and his original achievements in it” (xii). The edition, Parker hoped, would spur readers to take account of evidence that would let them think sequentially about Melville’s life and works in the months following the publication of Moby-Dick. In this book, we ourselves attempt to comprehend Melville’s original design for Pierre and his original achievements. We attempt, that is, to describe the experience of reading the Pierre that Melville first completed. In the course of the book we tell the story of a crucial period of Melville ’s creative life, from the fall of 1851 to the spring of 1853; proper understanding of Pierre, we argue, demands that this biographical evidence be taken into account. In chapter 1, we focus on Melville’s composition of the first version of Pierre in late 1851, setting the book in the context of his life and literary career. In chapters 2–5, we analyze what we can plausibly reconstruct of this original version (the version represented in the Kraken edition). In our 1978 essay we gave a sequential reading of the published 1852 version of the novel, even though we argued that Melville’s belated decision to turn Pierre into an author had introduced major inconsistencies into the work. Here, in chapters 2–5 we read the same Pierre that students of Melville are all familiar with, with the big exception that we read nothing about Pierre as an author. In the process, we demonstrate both the cohesion and the eventual discontinuities of this original version of the novel. Then, in chapter 6, we briefly set forth the circumstances of Melville’s abrupt decision to declare that Pierre had been a juvenile author and his further decision to portray Pierre as an author still young but forced too early into would-be maturity. More thoroughly than we did in 1978, we next analyze these added passages on Pierre as an author, demonstrating that, while some of them are powerfully written, they frequently contradict or obscure Melville’s original intentions and achievements. Chapter 7 gives a brief account of the publication and reception...